Category: Military Page 9 of 11

I’ve been meaning to write about the fact that people don’t understand the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan and Mexico for some time.

In simple terms: the US military, the most expensive, most powerful military in the world, lost in Iraq (they had to pay bribes to leave). They are losing in Afghanistan. In Mexico the state has been unable to control drug gangs. In Lebanon, the IDF, the most powerful military in the Middle East, was defeated by Hezbollah. Hezbollah also won the e-lint war against the IDF.

(Kicking this to the top again, I want more people to see it. – Ian)

Technology is not necessarily on the side of the great powers, of the big armies. IEDs are cheap, any halfway competent mechanic can make them with materials that are readily available even in Afghanistan. Weapons are widely available everywhere, and soon it will be trivial to 3D print most of them. Drones, which people are so scared of (with reason) are essentially remote controlled airplanes, they are not hard to make, and they will spread to guerillas, resistance movements, terrorists and so on.

These are, yes, terror weapons, as the US, in its use of bombing and drones, well understands. They are also area denial weapons, weapons that prey on the psyche of the opposition, leaving them no peace and quiet.

They are weapons whose widespread use can and will destroy nations by destroying the peace and stability required for prosperity and normal life.

But they are very, very effective. They will work in virtually any nation if a large enough portion of the population wants them to work.

Do not think that the more intelligent members of current elites don’t know this. They understand what many on the left don’t: that first world militaries can be defeated, have been defeated, and that it can happen in their own countries.

And I suspect they are very very scared. The surveillance state, routine assassinations by the executive, the loss of habeas corpus, and so on, are their response. Total surveillance, and the ability to take people out anywhere, any time, is their answer, which is why I keep saying that I will know people are serious about revolution when they take out surveillance systems as a matter of routine, when surveillance becomes ethically anathema.

Be scared, not because those on the left who insist that modern militaries are unbeatable and all anyone can do is supplicate the powerful are right, but because militaries are very fightable, but such fights leave countries in ruins. If the elites continue on their current course, in many first world countries, Iraq and Afghanistan and Mexico are the future. People with no future will fight, and too many people now know how this form of war works.

This is the future of war. If elites continue on their path of unaccountability, their insistence on destroying the future, and their crushing of prosperity, this is what will happen.

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Women in combat

By Ian Welsh

On December 27, 2013

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prompted by this Atlantic article on integrating women into combat, I thought I’d run through the basics (as I understand them), on this issue.

Let’s start with capability. On the con side, women generally:

have less upper body strength;
suffer stress fractures more easily;
run more slowly.

On the plus side, women generally:

have more long term endurance under adverse conditions. The list of endurance swimmers is as dominated by women as the list of weightlifters is by men: there are no male distance swimmers who can come even close to the best women. This translates into military jobs such as forward observing and sniping.
Appear to have far better fire control than men.

On the even side:

As best I can tell from looking at Olympic shooting and sniper records from WWII (where Russian female snipers feature on the list of top snipers), as well as anecdotally from gun-clubs, women are just as good a shot as men. A common joke runs that husbands try to convince their wives to shoot, then are upset when their wives are better than them.

In terms of capability, I don’t see a ton of argument for keeping women out of combat.

There are, however, social realities. The Israelis, who have a lot of experience with this, decided that the problem with women in combat wasn’t women, it was men: the men couldn’t get over the possibility of harm, or worse, coming to women. On the flip side, in the US military, rape by fellow soldiers is far too common.

And rape is likely to be the reality for women who are captured, as well. Do we want that? Men may be raped if captured, but they will not become pregnant as a result.

I do firmly believe that everyone in society should be combat trained. I think it ups the compliance costs for governments who wish to head in authoritarian directions for combat training to be given to the sort of people who normally wouldn’t have it. People who have authoritarian personalities are, generally, more comfortable with violence and more likely to be trained in its use. It’s good for society for everyone to have that training so authoritarians don’t have a near monopoly. It is for this reason that despite all the problems with it, I support the draft: when the US moved to a volunteer army, made up primarily of southerners, it created a dangerous situation: an army that is not representative of the population, which considers itself (and is considered) superior to civilians.

Combat training, however, is not the same as being combat troops. Everyone may receive Basic and even some advanced training, without being expected to fight except in the most desperate of situations.

Finally, if a nation does want to go down the route of female combatants, I tend to think that combat units should be gender segregated: this protects women from both men’s concern in combat, where it is inappropriate, and from their predation back on base.

Putin Stings America

By Ian Welsh

On September 4, 2013

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I bring to your attention these two beauties:

“We have a contract for the delivery of the S-300s. We have supplied some of the components, but the delivery hasn’t been completed. We have suspended it for now. But if we see that steps are taken that violate the existing international norms, we shall think how we should act in the future, in particular regarding supplies of such sensitive weapons to certain regions of the world.”

Translation: if you bomb Syria against our wishes, we will make sure it’s much harder for you to bomb other countries in the future.

6. On U.S. failure to bring Snowden home to face justice:

“Representatives of the American special services — and I hope they won’t be angry — but they could have been more professional, and the diplomats as well. After they found out that he was flying to us, and that he was flying as a transit passenger, there was pressure from all sides — from the Americans, from the Europeans — instead of just letting him go to a country where they could operate easily.”

Translation: Your secret services are incompetent. Why not let him fly somewhere where you can send a drone, or helicopter gunships or covert operatives?

Of course, that’s why Snowden went first to China and then to Russia: they are countries that the US can’t drone without huge repercussions. Most countries can’t do a damn thing if the US sends in drones or gunships, they just have to take it, they have no real retaliatory ability.

Putin’s a profoundly evil man, as with most world leaders, but he’s also one of the few who is also frighteningly competent.

As for Syria, it is now clear that Obama will almost certainly get his war resolution, unless there’s a huge caucus revolt amongst Republicans. The Ba’ath will fight, they have no choice because they believe (correctly, in my opinion) that if they lose their families and communities will be slaughtered. Syria may not have the best Russian AA weapons, but it has better weaponry than any other enemy the US has faced in decades, and has Iranian and Hizbollah support (ie. competent advisers and troops with which to use those weapons.)

Bin Laden’s insights and the Egyptian Coup

By Ian Welsh

On August 3, 2013

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This is the sort of post that makes people mad, but in light of what’s happening in Egypt it’s necessary to talk about bin Laden.

Most people who hate bin Laden have never read read his writings. They’re quite extensive, and they’ll reward your time in reading them. (Obligatory bin Laden is a bad man, just like George Bush Jr. disclaimer.) Bin Laden was very smart, and and he understood America very well, and had a good take on the world system. He was not stupid, he was not a coward (he lead troops from the front line against the Soviets), and he was very effective at accomplishing many of his goals. Along with George Bush Jr, who was his greatest ally and enemy, he was was one of the first great men of the 21st century. Great men, of course, do not need to be good men. Hitler and Churchill and Gandhi were all great men, they weren’t all good men.

Let’s start in relation to Egypt. A lot of people in Egypt and elsewhere see the Egyptian coup (it was a coup, don’t tell me otherwise) as being US backed. Add to this the fact that they see the defeat of the Muslim brotherhood in the past as being aided by the US, they believe that Egypt is ruled by its current oligarchy (an extension of the Mubarak era oligarchy, and again, don’t even try and lie and say otherwise), because of the US.

What bin Laden said was that despotic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere are backed by America in specific, and the West in general. That backing is powerful. In Islam there is an idea that you should deal with your local tyrant, your local problems, first, and not worry about the far enemy. Bin Laden believed that, in the current circumstance, you could not do that. Revolution at home was close to impossible because of the far enemy, because of the United States. Even if you did, by some miracle succeed, as long as the US was the global hegemon, your success would be undermined and destroyed by the US by crippling your economy, escalating, if necessary, to economic sanctions backed by force. If you don’t believe this, see what was done to Iraq in the 90s and what is being done to Iran today. A lot of children and adults are dying and suffering because of these sanctions.

Bin Laden’s argument, then, was that the US had to be defeated. That the evils being done by local regimes (such as the extensive use of torture and routine rape in Egypt under Mubarak) could not be ended by simply fighting the local regime, but that the far regime, the US, must be defeated.

This is a pragmatic argument, and it is an ethical argument. When Madeline Albright said that half a million dead Iraqi children from US sanctions was “worth it”, bin Laden’s response was to ask if the lives of Muslim children were not equal to those of Christian children. Rhetorically, he asked, “is our blood not red too?”

Whatever you think of bin Laden, this is a powerful ethical statement.

What this leads to is that the US is responsible both for the suffering it causes directly, and the suffering it causes indirectly, by keeping monstrous regimes in power, or, in many cases, helping create them.

This critique is not just a critique from an Islamic perspective, it strikes to the heart of the West’s ostensible ethics, to the equality of all humans, to the right of self-determination, and even to the western theoretical preference for democracy. Democracy is a powerful idea, but bin Laden (and others) have observed that the West only believes in elections when the right people win. This was best on display when Hamas, in Palestine, won elections the US had insisted occur (over Israeli objections) and the US then backed a Fatah coup to make sure that Hamas did not take power. (Hamas later kicked Fatah out of Gaza, leading to the current divided rule of Palestine.) It doesn’t take a genius to see that this applies to the current Egyptian situation. Whatever one thinks of Morsi’s government, it was elected in what seem to have been fair elections.

So, if you play the West’s rules, if you win fair and square in elections, and the West doesn’t like who came to power, they will help undo the results of the elections. If you try and get rid of a regime you don’t like through violence, the West will support the regime, making it unlikely you will win, and if you do win despite all that, they will undermine or destroy your regime through economic sanctions. All that failing, as in Iraq, they may well invade.

The problem with this critique is that it is, substantially, accurate. Hate bin Laden or not, this is a model of the world which has predictive and analytical utility. It explains the past, it predicts the future, and it does both well. The fact that bin Laden’s critique is fairly similar to various left-wing critiques is not accidental. It is not because bin Laden and the left are fellow travellers (Islamists are strongly opposed to genuine leftists), it is because any set of model that track reality fairly well will tend to look alike. Of course, that they look the same is used to discredit people by association. “You agree with bin Laden” they say, and shut down discussion of how the world actually works.

The power of bin Laden’s critique is its accuracy, the elements of it which are true. What bin Laden added (though I’m sure others have as well), was one main thing: the directive to attack the US.

Bin Laden was, in certain respects, born of the Afghan war against the USSR. Those of you who are young tend to view what happened to the USSR as inevitable. Creaky, economically broken, it was going down. Nothing is so inevitable as what has already happened. You’re not wrong, the USSR had real internal problems it couldn’t fix, but you’re not quite right, either. Absent Afghanistan, the USSR might have toddled on for a lot longer. Decades, perhaps.

Looked at from the outside, even in the 90s (heck, even in the 80s, with some prescience), the US does not look healthy. It looks economically sick, with stagnation of wages even in the 90s, a gutting of real productivity, soaring inequality, and political sclerosis leading to the creation of an elite detached from the actual economy, but instead playing financial games which do not track real economic power. It looks, like the USSR did, like a society which, with a push, could collapse.

Bin Laden set out to give the US that push.

Let’s go back to the USSR. The Soviet military was not a joke. It was large, powerful, had good equipment (especially compared to Afghan tribesmen). Even the post Soviet Russian military is no joke (take a look at what they did to Georgia, recently.) The USSR was POWER.

And in Afghanistan, the USSR was worn down. All that power died in the grave of Empires. And soon thereafter, the USSR ceased to be.

Bin Laden was there. He saw it. He participated in it as a fighter.

He looked at the West, and the US in specific and believed that the US was ripe for something similar. As with the USSR the US in the 90s had a very scary reputation. Remember how decisively Saddam was defeated in the first Gulf War. The US looked undefeatable. And, in certain respects it was, and still is.

But bin Laden saw, accurately, the US weakness. He believed that while the US was good at open field warfare, American troops were nothing special at the sort of guerrilla warfare that had occurred in Afghanistan. He believed that if they could be brought into Afghanistan, and kept there, instead of coming in and leaving quickly, they could be defeated. He believed that the legend of American invincibility, as with that of the Red Army, could be shattered.

9/11 was about getting the US to overreact. About getting it into Afghanistan. It succeeded in doing that, but bin Laden must have known some despair, because at first, Afghanistan wasn’t proving to be much of a graveyard at all. The majority of Afghans hadn’t liked the Taliban, didn’t mind them being blown over, and were willing to give the US and the West, a chance.

Then Bush stepped in, used 9/11 as the de-facto pretext, and invaded Iraq. And in Iraq, much of what bin Laden wanted to have happen in Afghanistan happened, with the bonus that Hussein (whom, as a secular Arabist, bin Laden was an enemy of) was gotten rid of too. Win/win. And meanwhile, in Afghanistan, coalition forces managed to alienate the Afghan population and ensure the return of the Taliban, while destabilizing Pakistan in addition. Bonus!

(Bush was able to rewrite the unwritten US constitution, however, and his victory in changing the nature of America has been confirmed by the fact that Obama has institutionalized almost all essential Bush policies and extended many of them.)

Now one can say that bin Laden lost (not because he was killed, that’s irrelevant and people who think it matters much are fools), because the US is still around, still powerful, and hasn’t collapsed.

But it isn’t over yet. The cost of the Iraq war, of 9/11, was huge, both in financial terms and in the changes wrought to the American psyche, unwritten constitution and society. Those lost years, and they were lost, should have been used to transition the US economy. Instead the money that should have done that was used to fund the Iraq war, and to keep money flowing a housing bubble was not just allowed, but encouraged, both by the Fed and by actively turning a blind eye to illegal activity.

The US economy has never recovered. Five to six years out, the absolute number of jobs hasn’t recovered, the actual standard of living for most people is dropping, income and wealth inequality is worse, and unsustainable spending is occurring without any plan to create an economy which can pay for it. Political sclerosis is worse, not better, the economic plan is to frack, frack, frack (which won’t work in the long run) and the US and the West are doubling down on a surveillance state and continuing to erode freedoms, which not only has much larger economic effects than most people realize, but weakens Western ideological power.

So bin Laden hasn’t lost yet. The reaction to 9/11 may yet be seen to be the precipitating event that made it essentially impossible for the US to reverse its decline, and made that decline far faster and far worse.

We started with Egypt, so let’s bring it back there. If you’re an Egyptian who believes (accurately) that there was a coup which overthrew a democratically elected government, and that the US was complicit at best, and actively involved at worst (John Kerry constantly insisting there was no coup is not in America’s interests here), then the basic critique still resonates. Even if you don’t want bin Laden’s end goal of a new Islamic caliphate, if you want independence, if you want to be able to defeat your local tyrants, well, the US is your enemy, the far enemy whose existence makes defeating the near enemies impossible. It is not a country you feel you can make peace with, a devil you can ignore because it is far away, but a country whose ability to intervene in your country must be somehow destroyed.

This basic analysis of the situation remains extremely powerful and convincing.

Bin Laden was the first great man of the 21st century. George Bush Jr. was the second (Obama is important, but is a secondary figure to Bush.)

And as long as bin Laden’s insights seem to explain the world, someone is likely to act on them.

May God, should he or she exist, aid us. We’re going to need it.

(Oh, and part of the opportunity cost of the Iraq war may well be hundreds of millions of deaths from climate change. You’re welcome.)

Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return—and so the wheel turns.

The Hidden Army: Hezbollah Teaches the World How to Fight

By Ian Welsh

On February 25, 2013

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Surveillance State notes something very, very important:

Hezbollah and Israel have been at war for some time. In an effort to stop Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters from communicating, Israel has in the past jammed the cell phone towers in the Hezbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon. Eager to make sure that didn’t happen again, Hezbollah has covertly built out a fiber-optic network throughout the areas it controls.

He then goes on to note that the last crisis between Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah was over the government trying to shut down that fiber-optic network. Hezbollah regarded that as an act of war:

(Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah) said the government’s decision to shut down Hezbollah’s fiber-optic communications network was tantamount to a declaration of war. For the (central) government, the network represented an intolerable example of Hezbollah’s efforts to set up an Iranian- and Syrian-backed state within Lebanon. Hezbollah justifies the network, which carried its communications during a 2006 war with Israel, as a vital security asset.

The interesting thing is that during the 2006 war, Hezbollah won the information war. Their communications remained secure, but Israeli soldiers carrying cell phones made calls which Hezbollah tracked. Even if they couldn’t listen in, being able to triangulate where some Israeli soldier is making a call from gives some very interesting, and useful, information.

Americans, Israelis and the West in general are used to assuming they’ll win the surveillance, electronic and information war. But Hezbollah defeated or drew Israel in all three. A network of tunnels, pre-prepared camouflage positions for missile launchers and the use of civilian clothes when troops were traveling made aerial surveillance and satellites virtually useless. The Israelis were never able to shut down the majority of Hezbollah’s missile launchers, any more than they’ve been able to find those of the Palestinians.

Hezbollah’s army is a secret one. It’s like an old fashioned spy agency.

It doesn’t exist.

If you’re enrolled in it, you don’t tell anyone. The war was rife with stories of soldiers being killed, and their families finding out for the first time that they were even in Hezbollah’s army. This, of course, is to make it impossible to use assassination, mostly aerial assassination, to take out key leaders.

Hezbollah is an almost perfect Darwinian organization. Israel uses informants and assassination? Great – we’ll keep even our membership secret. Israel uses air power? We’ll dig tunnels and set up aeriel blinds for our missile launchers. Israel doesn’t like taking heavy infantry casualties – fine then, we’ll set up overlapping bunkers which simply cannot be cleared without taking losses.

Hezbollah has created the new model army, and a new model state. Call it the Hidden Army. An army that blends in with the population, that moves only when it cannot be seen, that sets up in the expectation of surveillance. An army that knows all the high tech games, and spent the time to figure out how to nullify them. It sounds like a guerilla army, and it is, but it’s also much more: it’s an army capable of engaging in strategic warfare and an army capable of engaging in full on attrition defense warfare against Israeli main battle forces. It’s hard to overstate how impressive this is.

It’s an unrecognized State with a hidden army. Oh, the UN says there’s a Lebanese government with authority over Hezbollah. But everyone knows that the real government in southern Lebanon is Hezbollah. They pick up the garbage, they give out the pensions, heck, they have their own phone network. Crazy. When the Lebanese “government” picks a fight with Hezbollah, Hezbollah wins.

We are going to see many more of these unrecognized governments, with their hidden armies. Why? Because they work, and they work very well, both at providing government services to a population, and at frustrating much larger, more powerful and expensive conventional armies. As official governments fail, less recognized ones will pick up the pieces. And they will look to Lebanon to see how to do it, survive, and even win.

(Kicking this one to the front again – Feb 25, 2013 – originally reposted in 2009.)

(Another reprint. This one got some hostile reaction from people who missed the point. Hezbollah might be the most interesting and successful neo-state in the world. Anyone who isn’t studying it is a fool. )

Osama’s Death Changes Almost Nothing

By Ian Welsh

On May 2, 2011

Comments

I’m rather more interested in the Canadian election, which is also rather more important than Bin Laden’s death, but let’s run through this. First, however, insert obligatory “he’s a mass murderer who deserved death” statement here. OBL was an evil man and I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’m even kind of glad they killed him rather than capturing him, if only for the purely selfish reason that I didn’t really want to have to defend OBL when they tortured him, as, of course, they would.

Bin Laden still won: Yeah, sorry, but Bin Laden’s goal was to push the US into imperial overreach, causing economic collapse. He succeeded, with a lot of help from Bush and Obama’s stupidity, and there was nothing in Obama’s little speech that indicated he intended to seize this opportunity to pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan and end the security state. If anything, the security state will go into even further overdrive. Enjoy being groped.

No Drawdown, No End to Destruction of Civil Liberties And yeah, if Bin Laden hated America because of America’s freedoms (he didn’t) well he still won. The 4th amendment is dead, the 1st is on life support, and the TSA freely humiliates you or denies you freedom to travel at their whim.

No, it doesn’t mean Obama has won in 2012 The election isn’t going to be about national security, per se, it’s going to be about the economy. Hating Osama is great’n’all, but it doesn’t put a chicken in a pot, give you a place to live, or a job. It doesn’t reduce the price of gasoline one cent. The election is still well out, this euphoria will fade. That doesn’t mean Obama will lose 2012 either. It just means it isn’t as big a factor as most people seem to think it is.

Terror Networks: Doubt it makes all that much difference here, either, honestly. Most al-Q’aeda groups are essentially franchises, and the main one isn’t that important. I’m sure CIA agents stationed in Afghanistan in charge of drone attacks are breathing a sigh of relief, however. More to the point, it’s not clear to me that Osama is less dangerous as a martyr than as a living old man attached to a dialysis machine.

Bin Laden deserved to die, but when the euphoria dies down, his death doesn’t change much, if anything. He still accomplished his goal, a goal he was willing to die for. The Muslim world, Afghanistan and Iraq (and I’m sure, to his dying day, Bin Laden thought the Iraq invasion was a gift from Allah), are still going to be the graveyard of empire, this time the US empire. Oh, it’s not dead yet, but historians will look back to the invasion of Iraq and the continued occupation of Afghanistan as massive contributing factors.

So, whatever. Celebrate and have a good time, but the wars will go on, the 4th amendment is still a dead letter, the 1st amendment is on life support, the economy is in the toilet, gas is over$4 a gallon, Democrats and Republicans are still negotiating how fast to cut your SS and Medicare, unions are still being gutted, schools are still being turned into profit centers, and TSA agents will still touch your junk.

Why I’m Against Current Wars—and Most Foreseeable Wars, Too

By Ian Welsh

On January 12, 2011

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No, I’m not against all wars. But I’m against the Afghan war, the “secret” war in Yemen, the occupation of Iraq, and any war with Iran under any circumstances I can imagine.

Why? Because:

They are moronic (in the sense that they cannot be “won” and I oppose unwinnable wars);
The US is in steep decline in an economic/industrial sense and needs to spend its money on other things.

As noted, I’m not opposed to all wars. Hell I even supported the Afghan war up to the point where it became clear that it was destabilizing Pakistan, polls of Afghans indicated they wanted us out, and it become obvious it couldn’t be “won” in any meaningful sense.

Anyone who supports the current wars is not someone I have much time for, I’m afraid. I regard them as fundamentally stupid wars and significantly immoral to boot, plus on pragmatic terms I believe they are doing more harm than good to the US, not just economically, but in terms of real security and in terms of the erosion of civil liberties. States at permanent war cannot and do not maintain their liberties. Permanent occupations are particularly corrupting and badly damage the real war fighting capacity of the armies doing them (see Army, Israeli).

Anyone who’s in favour of imperial wars and permanent war can’t really be on the left in any meaningful fashion, because the cost of permanent war is:

every domestic priority that left wingers claim to care about
plus the gutting of civil liberties in the core.

To a liberal, military spending is a necessary evil, and as such you do only as much as is necessary to:

actually defend the country. (I.e., hardly any. Who is going to invade the US?)
hold open necessary trade lanes. (I.e., the navy would be smaller than it is now and differently organized, but it would be the primary US military arm.)

And that’s about it. Every dollar spent on the military is not spent on actual economically productive activity. Yes, there are some exceptions, but there are other ways to do R&D spending, and more and more military R&D is not applicable to civilian matters.

(I’m sure Vladimir Putin laughs himself sick every night that the US pays him off to help America stay in Afghanistan. The irony must be one of the great joys of his life.)

In terms of dependence on foreign commodities, the progressive solution is to move the energy basis of the US economy off of oil and onto a basis which is much more domestically available (and built). That way you don’t need to be able to knock around middle eastern nations.

While many lefties wouldn’t agree with me, I would also move to mandatory service, everyone serving 2 to 4 years. Most wouldn’t serve in the military, but every male and any woman who wants it would get military training. A militarily trained population tends to concentrate the minds of politicians and other elites and I also believe that the military should be much more representative of the population as a whole, for a variety of reasons.

What do you do with all those people in national service? Rebuild the country: teach them skills and put them to work on broadband, infrastructure of various kinds, refitting all buildings for energy efficiency, etc… Why? Well, because that makes the country more secure and safer by reducing dependence on foreign oil, etc… (Well, that’s one reason.)

In my opinion anyone who’s for the current war is delusional or attached to the military industrial complex and willing to betray their country’s real interests for money. The US cannot afford war. Period. To be for war right now is to be for the ruin of America.